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Back in the 1950s, Walt Disney’s Disney Land television program aired a series about “Davy” Crockett, the “King of the Wild Frontier.” As a boy of nine, I really wanted to watch the series but being that I was in Training Union and church at Lavinia Baptist on Sunday nights, I was unable to unless I played sick so I could stay home. The series was accompanied by a song that started out “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, raised in the woods so he knowed every tree….” Every kid in America was singing it and many lusted for “coonskin” caps and Davy Crockett rifles so they could play at being “King of the Wild Frontier.”

What I didn’t know, or didn’t understand, was that the ‘wild frontier” Davy was king of was right there where I was growing up in West Tennessee (all of West Tennessee was and still is rural except Memphis, Jackson and a couple of smaller cities and towns.) When I did see the series, it indicated that Ole Davy lived in the Smoky Mountains. In fact, for much of his life he lived only some 40 miles from where I grew up and at the same time as my ancestors, who knew him. David Crockett was born in East Tennessee but not in the Smokies. He was actually born and spent his childhood west of the Smokies in the Appalachians southeast of Bristol and Johnson City. Actually, he spent part of that time on the road driving cattle, beginning at the age that many American boys were so enraptured with the Crockett story. He left East Tennessee as a young man and settled initially in Middle Tennessee nearFFayetteville, which is not far from where my MacGowan ancestors settled at about the same time. He moved several times, each time to counties in southern Middle Tennessee and finally ended up near Lawrenceburg. After a creek flooded and destroyed the grist mill he had invested in, he left Middle Tennessee in 1821 at the age of 35 and crossed the Tennessee River to find land for himself and his relatives in the new lands Andrew Jackson and Issac Shelby had purchased from the Chickasaw three years before. He found land on the Obion River in what was then Carroll County, the county where I grew up. According to one recent biographer, the land was owned by his father-in-law, who deeded it to David. A few years later, he was one of a delegation that went to Nashville to propose the formation of a new county out of the western section of Carroll to be called Gibson County.

In the late 1970s I went to work for Taylor Aviation at the Everett-Stewart Airport at Union City, Tennessee. It is an old airfield, dating back to World War II when it was used as a primary training field. Several of the original buildings remained and were rented to various tenants. One was a somewhat eccentric woman in her late 40s named Mary. The wife of a professor at nearby University of Tennessee, Martin, Mary was an accomplished artist. Her wildlife art was fantastic. I wished then and I wish now that I had been able to afford to buy some. Mary was also a pilot. She either had or was working on her commercial pilot’s license. She loved to fly Taylor’s Piper Arrow, but she didn’t want to fly by herself. Shortly after I went to work there, I went up with Mary. We were flying south from the airport over the Obion Bottom. Mary pointed down and said “that’s Crockett’s Bottom.” After reading Crockett’s narrative, I realized that indeed it was.

Crockett’s new land was on the edge of what was and still is pretty close to swampland. However, it was very rich land and there was an abundance of game. He sent for the rest of his family and several of his relatives to follow him to West Tennessee and claim land of their own. They did. After building cabins and clearing land, they raised cotton and corn to sell as well as vegetables for their own sustenance. Crockett supplemented his income by hunting bears, both for their meat and their fat which was prized for bear grease. He ranged far and wide around West Tennessee hunting bear. A few months ago when I was in West Tennessee for a family reunion, my aunt rode with us from Jackson, where we were staying, to Huntingdon where the gathering took place. I took a back road that passed by where my grandmother grew up. “There was a tree over there where Davy Crockett killed a bear.” After she said it, I vaguely remembered Daddy telling me something about there being a tree on his grandmother’s place where Crockett had killed a bear. My grandparents lived on that place for a few years before they bought a place of their own. My great-grandfather’s farm wasn’t far from the Obion River South Fork. There is record in the Carroll County Courthouse where Crockett collected a bounty for a wolf he had killed in the Obion Bottom near Huntingdon.

Crockett was not a wealthy man. In fact, he was often deep in debt. He came up with a scheme to cut timber in the recently created Reelfoot Lake (the lake was created by an earthquake which changed the course of the Mississippi a few years before Crockett moved to West Tennessee) and float it down the Mississippi to New Orleans to sell it. He and his associates cut a large number of trees and constructed a raft. Unfortunately, they had not reckoned on the force of the river. Soon after they cast themselves on to the river, the raft hit a sandbar and came apart, spilling its occupants on to the river. Left with nothing but what they were wearing, the survivors somehow made their way to Memphis where a “wealthy benefactor” bought clothes and a hat for Crockett. The wealthy benefactor was Marcus Winchester, one of the founders of Memphis. Winchester would later be ostracized after he married a beautiful young woman from Louisiana who obviously had negro blood. Shortly afterwards, Winchester convinced Crockett to run for Congress and gave him money for his campaign. As soon as Crockett got to Washington, he drew a bank draft and sent it to Winchester to pay him back.

Except when Congress was in session and he was in Washington, Crockett remained in Gibson County until he left for TExas in November 1835.. His last home was near Kenton. In the 1950s during the Disney Crockett craze, the town of Rutherford built a replica of Crockett’s last home and reinterred his mother Rebecca Hawkins’ remains from a nearby cemetery to the site.

Crockett, who detested the “Davy” moniker, spent almost half of his adult life in West Tennessee – from age 35 to age 50. Yet, both East Tennessee, which he left as a young man, and Texas, where he only spent some three months, lay more claim to him. When Tennessee built a state park and named it after him, it was located in East Tennessee near where he was born. Another park was located just outside Lawrenceburg, where he lived for four years before moving to West Tennessee where he spent the remainder of his life except for the last five months.

After David’s death, his family did not move to Texas. Although his son went to Texas, he didn’t stay. He returned to West Tennessee where he remained until just before the Civil War when he returned to Texas with his mother, who died in Texas but lived most of her life in Tennessee. Crockett’s son John Wesley ran for and won his Congressional suit. He lived for a time in New Orleans then moved back to Tennessee where he died in Memphis.

Was David Crockett really the “King of the Wild Frontier?” If he was, it was the same frontier on which my ancestors settled in the 1820s-40s.

A piece of what is obviously a piece of an airplane wing has been discovered on Reunion, a small island in the Seychelles off the coast of Africa just east of Madagascar some 2,900 nautical miles southwest of the point where the airplane was seen to make a turn and radar contact was lost. At the time, I looked at the information available and determined that if the airplane continued on the course it was on when last picked up by radar, it would go down somewhere in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar. Now that a piece of obvious airplane wreckage was discovered in the surf off Reunion, it appears that my theory is correct. A suitcase was also found in the same vicinity a few days earlier.

Let’s look at the situation again. The Boeing 777 had taken off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing. It was over the Gulf of Thailand when it was turned over to Vietnam air traffic control. At the time, it was in a dead zone and the crew was given a point at which to make the contact, which they never made. The radar transponder disappeared from the radar controller’s screen, which is normal because the range of the transponder is only a couple of hundred miles at most. Air traffic control radar only has a range of about the same distance. (I made several trips from Houston to Mexico and Central America. We would lose radar contact shortly after leaving the Texas Gulf Coastline and were required to report our position until we were picked up by Mexican radar. There was also about 100 miles or so when we were not in VHF radio contact.) Military radar picked up a contact at about the same place where the airplane was last seen and its track was shown to be somewhat in the opposite direction. The military radar was painting the airplane’s skin and other metal components that reflect radar waves. When the object disappeared from the military radar, it was still on the same heading, a heading that would take it over the Indian Ocean toward the African coast. A plot would put the track north of the Seychelles, but not by much.

The radar track never showed the airplane turning to the south. The turn to the south was a theory put forth after the British company that made the airplane’s satellite communications telephone claimed that their satellites had been “pinged” by the airplane’s equipment. The airplane was supposedly equipped to transmit hourly engine information but there was some question as to whether the airline subscribed to the service. The company “plotted” a course based on the signals it’s satellites supposedly received and determined that it turned south and headed over the South Indian Ocean past Australia. Although the authorities bought the theory, not every was convinced.

That the airplane made a turn back toward Malaysia is consistent with some kind of mechanical problem, probably electrical that caused the communications and navigation systems to fail. It is probable that there was also an explosive loss of pressurization and the pilots may have initiated a descent although there is no way to know since they were not observed by radar. The military track was very faint and had no azimuth. (As I understand it, the track was discovered several days after the incident and was not observed at the time.) A 777 once experienced a sudden cockpit fire on the copilots side that burned through the side of the airplane in an instant. Fortunately, it happened on the ground. Had this happened inflight, the airplane would have lost pressure immediately, which would have incapacitated the crew before they could get on oxygen and caused an electrical failure. The engines would have continued to run as long as they were getting fuel. (Electrical power is only required to start a jet engine – once the fuel in the burner cans ignites, it keeps burning.) Depending on where the fire was and which electrical systems were affected, the airplane could have still had power which would have perhaps kept the autopilot functioning. There have been instances where airplanes lost pressurization and everyone on board lost consciousness but the airplane flew until it ran out of fuel.

The current media reports are claiming that the wreckage followed ocean currents and ended up in the Seychelles from somewhere off of Australia but I find this doubtful since it often takes years for debris to cross an ocean, not to mention that debris in the South Indian Ocean usually goes south rather than northwestward. Don’t be surprised if more debris shows up in the Seychelles, on Madagascar and the African coast.

This is how I became the Tennessee Flyboy. I was born a few weeks after World War II ended. My dad had served in the Army Air Corps during the war as a mechanic and aerial gunner on B-24 Liberators. His brother was a B-24 pilot. Naturally, we were an air-minded family. We were also a farm family, which meant we spent a great deal of our time out of doors. Even if we were in the house and heard an airplane go over, we’d run out to see what kind it was. One of my earliest memories is of an airshow we went to at McKellar Field outside of Jackson. I can still see the yellow Piper Cub picking up a guy from the top of a car. We’d count how many airplanes we saw each day.

I can’t remember the exact time when I decided that when I grew up, I was going to fly. When I was in eighth grade, an Air Force radar bomb scoring team set up shop in the Milan Army Ammunition Plant complex a few miles from our house. For about six weeks, we had B-47s and B-52s with an occasional B-36 flying low over our house, starting at 9:00 PM and continuing until mid-morning. They were low, at no more than 500 feet above the ground and were probably as low as 300, mostly at night. The road in front of our house must have been a checkpoint on their flight plan because as soon as they reached it, the pilots would shove up the power and begin the spectacular climbing turn I later learned was called the LABS nuclear delivery method. They weren’t carrying nukes; plotters In the railroad care calculated each crew’s accuracy from the radar plots. A little over a decade later, I’d be working with those very same teams, only we were dropping real bombs, big ones. (www.sammcgowan.com/bomber.html.) There is one thing for certain; by the time Strategic Air Command finished the operation and moved the train, I had decided for certain that I was going to fly airplanes when I grew up.

My first airplane flight was in a Piper Tri-Pacer from the Humboldt, TN airport. My aunt Mary Nell took me and my younger brother to the airport one Sunday afternoon. The pilot, Mickey Spears, let me fly. I took us straight to my grandparent’s farm then to our farm about five miles away. I took one more flight from Humboldt, this time in a Cessna 170. My next flight was in a Braniff Convair 240 when I left Memphis for Air Force basic training at Lackland AFB outside of San Antonio. Yet even though I had joined the Air Force, it wasn’t until almost four years later that I took my first flying lesson. By that time, I was already a flyboy. In the summer of 1964 I cross-trained from aircraft maintenance to the aircraft loadmaster career field and went on flying status as a crewmember on C-130 transports. http://www.sammcgowan.com/military.html One Saturday afternoon, two of my buddies and I got in a Skoshi cab at the main gate at Naha Air Base, Okinawa where we were stationed and rode some twelve miles to Yomitan Airfield, where the Kadena Aero Club was based to start flying lessons.

I wish I could say that my introduction to flying was a pleasant experience. It wasn’t. My first instructor was a screamer. He was a DOD civilian who had some kind of job there on the island. He had me do a spin on my very first lesson. We were flying a yellow Piper J-3 Cub, which is soloed from the rear seat. I flew the airplane from the back seat and the instructor was in front. It was hard to see over him. I was only able to fly every seventeen days or so because most of my duties were in Southeast Asia. We’d be sent to Cam Ranh Bay or Bangkok for sixteen days so I’d schedule a lesson for one of the three days of free time I was entitled to after each stint of temporary duty. I took about three lessons in the Cub then switched to an Aeronca Champ. I also switched instructors. My new one was a young Army Specialist Fourth Class. The difference between him and my first instructor was like night and day. The Champ was different too. Champs are soloed from the front seat so I now sat in front with the instruments right in front of me. I desperately wanted to solo before I left Okinawa but I was having a little trouble with landings. In July I left Naha for a new assignment at Robins AFB, Georgia where I would be flying on C-141s.

While I was home on leave, I went to the nearest airport between Milan and Trenton, Tennessee and took a few lessons. Once again, I was in a different type of airplane, a Cessna 150, a fairly new one. I took four or five lessons but still hadn’t soloed when I left home to drive to my assignment at Warner Robins. I was happy to learn when I got there that the base had an aero club. At the time, it was at Wilson Field just outside of Macon. The club had a variety of airplanes but the primary trainers were Cessna 150s. However, they were older than the ones at Gibson County. My new instructor was Van Thaxton, a civilian who worked on the base. Van was a good instructor. One day we were practicing takeoffs and landings. After one landing he told me to pull off and let him out. Then he sent me off on my first solo flight. Van told me to make two touch and goes and a landing, but the nose wheel started shimmying after my first landing so I made a full stop and taxied to the ramp. It wasn’t a big deal. All I needed to do was ease back on the yoke and take the weight of the nose wheel but Van and the club manager, a retired major, said I made the right decision. Regardless, I had made my first solo flight. For some reason, no one thought to cut off my shirt tail and hang it on the wall. Personally, I wasn’t upset that they didn’t. I was wearing one of the Thai silk shirts I had made up a couple of years before when I was TDY to Ubon, Thailand. I went up with Van again, probably the next day, and he soloed me again. He endorsed my student license and my log book for unsupervised solo.

For the next year, I continued working on my private pilot’s license. It took me longer than most because of my schedule. I was flying as a crewmember on C-141s and was rarely at home for more than three or four days at a time. We were required to have on hour of free time for every three hours we spent away from home station, up to a maximum of 72 hours. If I was out long enough to get the full three days, I usually hopped in my Cougar and hit the road for West Tennessee. When I flew solo, I practiced the private pilot maneuvers. Sometimes Van flew with me. I had been at Robins for exactly a year when I got word that I was going back overseas, this time to Clark Field in the Philippines. Moreover, I was supposed to be at Sewart AFB, Tennessee in two weeks for C-130 training. I was told that because I had previous C-130 experience, Military Airlift Command was requesting a waiver of the school because so many loadmasters had just received orders that a shortage was developing. I was getting ready to leave that night on leave to go to West Tennessee for my sister’s wedding. My NCOIC told me to go on home and he’d let me know if I needed to come back early.

I had already passed the FAA written test. I took it and my logbook with me. I went to Milan and told Lawrence Browning, who ran the airport, that I wanted to take the practical test. Lawrence was busy with crop dusting so he put me with Mike Jones, a local boy who worked at ITT and was a CFI. Now, I had already completed all of the requirements to take the practical test but the FAA required that I have a recommendation from an instructor. Looking back, I can see that Mike should have flown with me one time then set me up for the flight check. He probably needed the money or wanted the flight time because he insisted on flying with me at least three times. Finally, he set me up for a flight check with an FAA examiner from Paris, Tennessee, about fifty miles away. I’ve forgotten the man’s name. On the appointed day, I got in Lawrence’s Cessna 150 and flew to Paris where the examiner was waiting at the airport. He asked me a few questions and had me lay out a flight plan to Dyersburg. When I was ready, we got in the airplane and started out on the flight. A few minutes into the flight, we passed over a town. I looked down at my map and said it was my first checkpoint. He said, okay, let’s break off and do some air work. He had me do a stall and a turn and then said to head back to the airport. I thought I had done something wrong but when we got on the ground, he asked for my student pilot license and began writing out a temporary private pilot certificate. A few minutes later, I was in the airplane with a brand new license in my wallet. When I got to the end of the runway, I noticed that the directional gyro was off by ten degrees. I looked at my map and realized that the cluster of buildings I thought was my checkpoint was actually a little south of my route. Oh well, I had the ticket in my pocket!

As it turned out, MAC got the extension and I stayed at Robins until November instead of leaving in two weeks. Van wasn’t happy that I had taken the flight check while I was on leave but I felt I had no choice. CFI’s get credit for students they recommend who pass the flight check so he lost credit for mine (Mike Jones got it.) By this time, the aero club had moved from Wilson Field to the Air Force Base. I took at least one of my buddies for a ride. Stony Burk caught the flying bug and eventually became a pilot himself. We both had orders to Clark and went to the same squadron. I left Warner Robins the night before Thanksgiving. In early February, 1969, I arrived at Clark and a new chapter of my life as a flyboy.